The Wonderfulness of . . .

[truepenny]

[first published on Storytellers Unplugged, October 7, 2010]

While my ankle mends and I struggle with Restless Legs Syndrome (which, by the way, I do not recommend ), I’ve been watching I Spy on Hulu. I Spy, which ran from 1965 to 1968 and starred Robert Culp and Bill Cosby, is awesome, but its awesomeness is not actually what I want to talk about for this post.

There’s a curious phenomenon, you see, of mid-sixties spy shows. Because on the one hand you have I Spy, and on the other, you have The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968, starring Robert Vaughn and David McCallum). (I’m not going to talk about Get Smart (1965-1970), because I haven’t seen any episodes since I was a small child, but it would be an interesting way to complete a trifecta.) Both shows, aside from their mid-60s runs and their stars named Robert, were conceived of as James Bond spoofs. Both feature an American agent (Culp, Vaughn) teamed with someone who is in some way an outsider to mainstream (i.e., white, middle-class) American culture: a Russian, an African-American–and I Spy does not hesitate to point out the prejudice Alexander Scott (Bill Cosby) fights against. Napoleon Solo (Vaughn) and Kelly Robinson (Culp) are very similar characters–a little feckless, very charming, easily ensnared by a pretty female face–just as there are a lot of similarities between Kuryakin (McCallum) and Scott: both are scholarly (Scotty was a Rhodes scholar, and Illya has a Ph.D. in Quantum Mechanics), both serve as straight men for their partners’ whimsical approach to life (although each gives as good as he gets in back-and-forth banter). And in both shows, the partnership between the two men is portrayed as the most important relationship in their lives, the single most important thing keeping them sane and able to function, the thing they will not and cannot betray. (Both shows have brainwashing episodes in which one partner is turned against the other. In both cases, the crux of the episode is the moment at which the brainwashing fails. Illya can’t kill Napoleon, just as Kelly fires at Scotty point-blank and misses.)

With all these similarities, you’d expect the shows to be very much alike, and yet they aren’t. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is a very clair show (using “clair” here as the opposite of “noir”); it’s not a spoof in the sense that Get Smart (1965-1970) is, but it’s always very meta, very self-aware, and–especially after the first season, which dabbled in the shallow end of noir–very careful to keep itself divorced from the real world. U.N.C.L.E.’s main opponent is THRUSH, not any real world country (like, say, the USSR). Napoleon and Illya have no personal lives that we ever see; there are only the vaguest references to their families and backgrounds; they don’t take vacations. You can almost imagine Waverly putting them away in their boxes in between affairs. The stories The Man from U.N.C.L.E. wants to tell are about espionage in the abstract, about the tension between the ordinary world and the spies creeping about behind the wainscotting.

I Spy, on the other hand, is about espionage as the ordinary world. It was the first TV show to be shot on location (unlike The Man from U.N.C.L.E., in which all airports really do look the same), and the episodes make use of the settings of Hong Kong, Mexico City, Madrid. Kelly and Scotty live in hotel rooms, and the show remembers that they live in hotel rooms. They talk about vacations (well, they bitch and moan about the vacations they don’t get), they have to explain their expenses to government officials, they walk a constant tightrope between maintaining their cover (as a tennis bum and his trainer) and getting the job done. We don’t know much about Kelly’s family, but both Kelly and Scotty write to Scotty’s mom in Philadelphia (it’s Kelly’s best threat: “I’m going to write to your mother!”); the show is built on the detritus and impedimenta of their daily lives as spies. And they don’t fight THRUSH, either. They’re up against Chinese agents and Russian agents–and the occasional freelance madman. (I find it interesting that the Russian agents are frequently human and sympathetic, while the Chinese agents are, um, not.) Scotty can’t save the heroin addict because she doesn’t want to be saved. Being tortured has psychological consequences; one episode deals with what is, in essence, Kelly’s nervous breakdown, although all the characters are very, very careful never to say so out loud. If The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is what you get when you refuse to take James Bond seriously, I Spy is what happens when you think James Bond through. Kelly and Scotty are tired and cynical; they believe in the ideals they’re fighting for (the most dated moments are the knee-jerk rhetoric about the Evils of Communism), but they’re frequently dubious about the means they have to employ, and always aware that they’re nothing more than replaceable parts as far as the higher-ups at the Pentagon are concerned. Nothing could be more different than the personal relationship Napoleon and Illya have with their boss, Mr. Waverly.

My point here, aside from the wonderfulness of I Spy and The Man from U.N.C.L.E., is that these two shows, despite their extensive similarities, are very different creatures. They have different thematic concerns; they go in different directions. And they provide a lovely example of the relative unimportance of originality. Because with the same basic premise and many of the same elements, they tell entirely different stories.

It’s a truism among doctoral candidates that as soon as you get your thesis topic approved, a well-known scholar in your field will publish a book on the same subject. (And it’s a truism because it happens. It happened to me with Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet and Purgatory.) The important thing about this truism, though, is that after the moment of white-out panic in which your entire academic career passes before your eyes, it doesn’t matter. The originality of your research doesn’t depend on your topic, it depends on what you have to say about your topic. And the same is true with storytelling. It’s not the idea of a James Bond spoof that’s original; it’s the difference between Napoleon Solo and Kelly Robinson, between Illya Kuryakin and Alexander Scott. It’s not WHAT you do that matters. It’s how you do it.